Authentic language teaching?

December 19th, 2010 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 19 December 2010

I come across the odd gem in my eclectic podcast listening and such was the case with an item in the BBC World Service radio programme Digital Planet of 15 September 2010 which focused on the work of Glovico.org which in its own words describes itself as :

“,,, a “fair-trade” language learning website, empowering people in the developing world to offer language learning opportunities to students in developed countries.”

The BBC News item about the initiative (17 September 2010) and the Digital Planet podcast are self explanatory and are both well worth a read and listen. Demonstrating perhaps another way of approaching teaching and learning and enabling those in other, sometimes less endowed, parts of the world to contribute whilst making a modest financial gain?

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ESTICT showcases engagement at a distance

December 14th, 2010 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 14 December 2010

I post to a number of technology in HE related blogs and when I feel there are items of general interest I also post them here in Auricle. This is one such posting which today focuses on the work of one special interest group.

There are now a number of special interest groups in the UK HE sector focusing and exploring various aspects of enhancing learning through the use of technology which the UK’s Higher Education Academy has helped give birth to, e.g. ELESIG, MELSIG, QAQESIG, SSELF, HEthicsWeb2.0, ESTICT, and just getting underway Games, Virtual Worlds and Higher Education. These SIGs are totally self-organising entities which plan and run their own online and face-to-face events, create their own resource bases, seek sponsorship, establish synergies, and, in some cases, undertake small scale investigations into their particular foci of interest; all are good examples of how peer education and development can make a valuable contribution to the HE ecosystem. We should also note that there are also other SIGs set up independently of the UK HE Academy such as the Association for Learning Technolgy’s (ALT) Video in Education SIG (ViE SIG) and Learning Environment Review SIG (LERSIG).

I try to participate in as many SIG events as is possible and so I attended the ESTICT event at the University of Bath on the 17 November 2010, which was one very wet and windy day. I found the whole day stimulating and

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More movement towards the bookless library?

September 26th, 2010 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 26 September 2010

I’ve been catching up on my podcast listening and came across this one from NPR’s Morning Edition titled Stanford Ushers in the Age of Bookless Libraries. A transcript is available but the story is still well worth a listen. With the increasing use of mobile devices, ebook readers, and online feeder services the very concept of what is a library and what is a librarian, indeed what is a student and what is a teacher, will be open to question. A factor I’ve partially addressed in my previous epublishing postings and in my concept of the e-learning “filling station”.

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Quote: Enjoy your successes but …

July 5th, 2010 No Comments

Here’s one for politicians, leaders and project/programme managers of all types everywhere.

Success is ephemeral but the possibility of chaos is eternal (paraphrased from Niall Ferguson’s High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg, 2010, Allen Lane).

One of the great “benefits” of accumulating years is that you get to be a participant in, and observer of, many periods of transition and change – some turbulent, some with positive outcomes, and some less so. I’m therefore, inclined to be with Ferguson/Warburg on this one.

Pessimistic optimism seems a good maxim lest Hubris calls forth Nemesis 🙂

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Ebooks in the ‘e-filling station’?

May 20th, 2010 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 20 May 2010

Any views expressed in this online essay are those of the author alone and should not be construed as necessarily representing the view of any other individuals or organisations.

Today’s posting is an addition to my de facto segue on ebooks, words and techno-anxiety a topic I’ve addressed at different levels in Same as it ever was (Auricle, 21 March 2010), No Country for Old Readers (Auricle, 28 February 2010), and Ebooks what ebooks? (Auricle, 21 February, updated 24 February).

The growing presence of mobile devices like smartphones and ebook readers reminds me of my deliberations about the impact of MLE/VLEs way back in 2004 when I first launched this iteration of Auricle as a blog. In summary, my concerns expressed at the time was that Higher Education had allowed itself to become locked into an immature and, at the time, invariably proprietary construct of what a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or more accurately a Managed Learning Environment (MLE) – alias Learning Management System (LMS) should be. Wind forward to 2010 and I find myself interested in whether mobile devices and portable e-readers have the rather confusing potential to either disrupt or reinforce the LMS concept. Or indeed in some cases to become a key facet of an ever evolving online learning environment. But why would this be the case?

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Quote: Television reaches parts that other media cannot reach?

May 3rd, 2010 No Comments

Television did it. It remains an enormously powerful medium. It brings human beings — their eyes and faces and thought patterns and personal effects — into your very living room. It shakes up existing feelings. It floods the frontal cortex not with policy but with personality.

Whether I always agree with him or not does not prevent me from thinking that Andrew Sullivan is a fine writer and commentator. The above quote is contained in Nick Clegg catches the angry transatlantic wind (Sunday Times, 26 April 2010). Putting aside the political context of this media column I think this quote highlights the particular capacity of some media forms to reach deeply into the emotional centres of our brains.

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Technology to Enhance Learning in 2015?

April 26th, 2010 1 Comment

by Derek Morrison, 26 April 2010 (updated 30 April 2010)

Any views expressed in this posting are those of this author alone and should not be construed as necessarily representing those of any other individual or organisation.

I recently gave a presentation on the future uses of technology to enhance students’ learning experiences at a university workshop with the theme “Technology to Enhance Learning in 2015” (Northumbria University, 21 April 2010). Rather than leave delegates with the traditional handout or presentation files I instead referred them to a URL offering a minor variant of this posting. One key benefit of taking this approach is that the original material can be considerably enhanced by providing extended responses to the questions asked by delegates and any related interactions which follow. There’s an opportunity, therefore, to continue to add value to resources which may have been initially generated for one context and event, but which also may of wider utility or interest. The following posting, therefore, offers a synopsis of this presentation plus my extended responses to questions asked.

So what can, should, or will, we offer the digital generation by 2015?

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Road testing ‘Tales of Things’ and QR Codes

April 17th, 2010 1 Comment

by Derek Morrison, 17 April 2010

So what’s are those strange objects embedded in this posting? Why are they there?

The Tales of Things web site went live yesterday and so I’m using this posting to try it out. Tales of Things is part of the EPSRC funded TOTeM project which is exploring aspects of how physical objects can become part of the ‘internet of things‘. Tales of Things is being realised through a consortium of UK HEIs, i.e. Brunel University, Edinburgh College of Art, University College London, University of Dundee and the University of Salford.

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BBC World Service – a reference model … for the BBC?

April 10th, 2010 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 10 April 2010

The following posting reflects the perspectives and opinions of the author alone and should not be construed as necessarily representing the views of any other individual or organisation.

In my short essay ELESIG puts head (or toe) in the Clouds (Auricle, 23 March 2010) I reflected on some of the issues relating to ‘ownership’ and preservation of the archives of content and interaction generated by social network implementations such as Facebook and on a smaller scale the OU hosted Cloudworks. So thanks to my colleague Terry Mayes who brought to my attention Wendy Hall’s recent contribution to the BBC’s World Service Forum (14 March 2010) which explored some of the issues in considerably more depth than my own humble posting. Wendy Hall is one of the alpha thought leaders, along with Tim Berners-Lee, regarding the development of the semantic web.

But as important as such weighty issues as the semantic web is the BBC World Service itself; it is an understated national gem. It receives a fraction of the main BBC radio budget, it doesn’t appear to do “star’ presenters with gross remuneration packages but, yet, the quality of what it produces is usually outstanding. The BBC World Service, however, has a typically eccentric British funding model. While the rest of the BBC is funded from the mandatory UK Licence Fee paid by UK television owners (it’s a criminal offence not to pay it) the World Service does not receive any income from that source. Instead the World Service is funded by a Parliamentary grant-in-aid, administered by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) of the British government (i.e. another taxpayer-funded channel). It transmits in languages decided by the FCO but editorial control remains with the BBC and consequently that includes, at times, being critical of UK government policy or representing the views of the “other”. Long may the eccentricity continue.

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The Collapse of Complex Business Models

April 8th, 2010 No Comments

by Derek Morrison, 8 April 2010

Clay Shirky’s online essay The Collapse of Complex Business Models (1 April 2010) should perhaps give all leaders of all types of organisation serious pause for thought. The key message of Shirky’s piece appears to be that leaderships and elites are comforted by organisational and bureaucratic complexity but that this also creates the conditions for inflexiblity and inability to adapt to change and, therefore, ultimately leads to failure of even previously successful societies and organisations. Shirky comments: In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one … when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” Whether we agree or not with Shirky’s premiss it’s a thoughtful piece and well worth a read.

As well as being adjunct Professor at New York University, Clay Shirky is an established author, commentator and broadcaster on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies.

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